“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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New York Times Editorial Board: The Clear Benefits of a Higher Wage
Republicans sputtered with outrage when the Congressional Budget Office said that immigration reform (pdf) would lower the deficit, strengthen Social Security and speed up economic growth. They called for the office to be abolished when it dared to point out that tax cuts raise the deficit or when it highlighted the benefits of health care reform. But now that the budget office has predicted (and exaggerated) the possibility that an increase in the minimum wage might result in a loss of jobs, Republicans think it’s gospel. [..]
What Republicans fail to mention is that Tuesday’s report from the budget office (pdf), a federal nonpartisan agency, was almost entirely positive about the benefits of raising the minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016, as President Obama and Congressional Democrats have proposed. [..]
Those benefits to millions of low-wage workers overwhelmingly outweigh the questionable possibility of job losses. Lawmakers who focus only on the potential downside of an enormously beneficial policy change are the same ones who never wanted to do it in the first place.
Dean Baker: True Free Market Proponents Should Support Private-Public Competition
The debate is often presented as between people who like the government and people who like the market. It isn’t
One of the initiatives President Obama announced in his State of the Union Address was the “MyRA,” an IRA that workers could sign up for at their workplace. The MyRA would be invested in government bonds and provide a modest guaranteed rate of return.
The MyRA has several useful features. It’s simple, it has low administrative costs, workers can have money deducted directly from their paychecks, and it has no risk. It also has the great advantage that President Obama can make MyRAs available to workers without seeking congressional approval.
However there was one very notable downside to the MyRA. Workers could not accumulate more than $15,000 in these accounts, at which point they would be required to fold their MyRA into an IRA run by the financial industry. People who commented on this requirement all assumed that this was a sop to the industry.
When the accounts are small, the industry wouldn’t make any money on them anyhow. Once they get to be a decent size the government will require savers to park their money with a bank or brokerage house. This is nothing but good news for the industry.
Clapper thinks if the NSA had informed us they were monitoring every American, that would somehow make it OK. It doesn’t
Director of Intelligence James Clapper now says the National Security Agency (NSA) should have been more open about the fact that they were spying on all Americans.
I’m glad he said this. But there is no excuse for lying in the first place. [..]
The United States needs intelligence gathering, the ability to obtain and keep secrets, spying on foreign powers and genuine threats and all the other tools nations use to protect their security. No one is disputing this.
But Clapper is being somewhat disingenuous here. Part of the reason our government does some things behind Americans’ backs is not for security, but because certain activities, if known, would outrage the public.
Spying on every American certainly falls into this category. I also believe it is blatantly unconstitutional, and bringing these activities to light would immediately spark debates the NSA would rather not hear.
Charles M. Blow: The Bias Against Black Bodies
The Michael Dunn case has caused us to look once again at the American culture and criminal justice system, and many don’t like what they see.
But we shouldn’t look at this case narrowly and see its particular circumstances as the epitome of the problem. They are not. The scope of the problem is far more expansive, ingrained and elusive.
This is simply one more example of the bias against – and in fact violence, both psychological and physical, against – the black body, particularly black men, that extends across society and across their lifetimes. And this violence is both interracial and intra-racial.
Richard (RJ) ESkow: Five Years After the Stimulus, Reality Itself Is Under Attack
It’s been five years since the passage of President Obama’s stimulus bill (officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). Its successes are well documented: an increase in the GDP of between 2 and 3 percent from late 2009 through mid-2011; six million “job years” created, which comes to 1.6 million additional people on the job each year through 2012; 44 months of uninterrupted job growth; and the reversal of an economy which was plunging into free-fall.
So why did only 37 percent of Americans support the Act three years later? Why has our political discourse become a political Theater of the Absurd in which the preternaturally uninformed Marco Rubio can proclaim, without perceptible embarrassment, that the stimulus “clearly failed”? Fox News even asked whether “the stimulus caused the recession,” despite the fact that the recession happened first.
Conservatism: a delusional force so powerful it can bend the space-time continuum.
Jim Willlis: Stand Your Ground Has No Moral Ground
Some laws are grey, but this one seems to be increasingly black and white. The Stand Your Ground law in Florida — and now 24 other states, including many in the South — was a major factor in jury deliberations for both the Trayvon Martin killing and now, the case of Michael Dunn, who killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis. George Zimmerman was acquitted of shooting an unarmed African-American teenager. The jury in the Dunn case failed to reach a consensus on the murder charge and the judge ruled a mistrial.
Both the Dunn and Zimmerman trials have highlighted a major theological problem with Stand Your Ground laws. In Romans 13, the apostle Paul describes the role of government as a positive one — meant to protect the poor and to promote the common good. The Stand Your Ground laws are based on fear — fear that is often rooted in racism. Rather than promoting a vision of the common good and what our life together should look like, it justifies taking life and codifies fear.
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